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Thursday, December 13, 2012

Lessons

[Updated May 3, 2013]

“It’s about power.” Those words open Season 7 and close Lessons, and so it is about power –
Season 7, I mean. Not in the sense we understood it in Checkpoint (where we hear Buffy say these very words to Quentin
Travers), nor in the sense that something similar was said in TTG and in Grave, but in a very different way entirely. The whole point of S7
is to explore what the show means by “power”.

Buffy tells Dawn in the teaser that “the stake is not the power”. That’s
easy to see. But there’s an important aspect of the lesson Buffy gives Dawn
which contains a clue to what Buffy will realize about power in the finale.

We next see Willow talking to Giles in England, and Willow tells us that
“it’s all connected”. She said something very similar in Grave: “It's like I, I'm connected to everything.” Again, though,
it’s clear that we’re to interpret this in a fundamentally different way.
There, her sense of being connected came from a dark power, like Jesse after
he’d been vamped in The Harvest: “I
feel good, Xander! I feel strong! I'm connected, man, to everything!” Here, the
fact that everything is connected gives Willow a form of power, in this case to
bring forth a flower. I think this scene is important for the season as well.

Lessons opens Season 7 much like Buffy v. Dracula opened S5. By this I
mean that the key moment in BvD came
in the final scene, which introduced Dawn. The final scene of Lessons should be just as challenging
and lead to similar questions: who or what was/were that in the room with
Spike?

More questions: Joss said before that season that the theme would be
“back to the beginning”, but what is “the true beginning” we’re going back to
according to the Master? What is it about power that’s so important? Who was
that girl in the teaser and what’s her connection, if any, to anything else?
I’ll give one clue about the unidentified girl: Joss: “this is
absolutely the primal scene for me, because it's everything that I made 'Buffy'
to get rid of. Was the girl who couldn’t get through it.”

Setting up the season isn’t the only purpose of Lessons, of course. There’s a new high school in town, which Dawn
is starting just as we saw Buffy start in WttH,
and it’s terrifying to the kids. But Buffy’s an adult now so it “seems
smaller”. The “manifest spirits” – I think they represent Buffy’s fears that she
won’t be able to protect Dawn in high school – turn out to pose little real
challenge. She can confidently tell Dawn, Kit, and Carlos that “You guys are
gonna be OK. School is intense, but you'll do all right as long as you're
careful.”

There is, by the way, a huge clue to the identity of the season’s Big Bad
in Spike’s conversation with Buffy. He told Buffy that her “ghosts” were
“manifest spirits raised by a talisman”. His wording here references a previous
episode, and I’ll make the connection explicit when we get to Never Leave Me.

Spike’s story in S7 follows the
metaphor of a pretty well-laid-out path for recovery from addiction. Here in Lessons, we see Spike in what we might
call the DTs, alone
by himself in the basement and acting delusional. Keep this in mind and I’ll
note the steps as we go through the season.

In Buffy v. Dracula we heard
Dracula tell Buffy that her power was rooted in darkness. Here we see that the
same is true of Willow. She may want to have the magic “just taken from her”,
but as Giles tells her, “You're connected to a great power, whether you feel it
or not. … This isn't a hobby or an addiction. It's inside you now, this magic.
You’re responsible for it.” This is the final nail in the coffin of the
magic/drugs metaphor; the best part about this is that we eliminate the
distraction and get to see how Willow responds to the challenge that Buffy
faces every day.

Lessons also contains perhaps my personal favorite
line in the entire series: “In the end, we all are who we are, no matter how
much we may appear to have changed.” Note, by the way, that the camera then
jump cuts to Xander, dressed, unusually, in a suit. Giles spoke the line to
Willow, but the jump cut tells us that it also applies to Xander.

I think Lessons is one of the
best season openers.

Trivia notes: There are many more references to previous seasons in S7,
so lots of trivia: (1) Like every season opener beginning with When She Was Bad, Lessons opens in a graveyard. (2) Buffy did indeed miss the heart
her first time, as we were shown in Becoming
1. (3) The scenes in England were shot at ASH’s home there. (4) When Giles tells Willow the magic is
inside her, this also hearkens back to Becoming
1, where he told her “channeling... such potent magicks through
yourself, it could open a door that you may not be able to close.” (5) Dawn
called Xander “Double-0 Xander”, a reference to James Bond. (6) Xander mentioned that the last two principals of
Sunnydale High were eaten: Principal Flutie in The Pack and Principal Snyder in Graduation Day 2. (7) Buffy’s warnings to Dawn about high school
included references to The Pack, Go Fish, and Out of Mind, Out of Sight. (8) The new principal introduced himself
as Robin Wood. Robin Wood is the name of a famous horror film analyst with a
strong feminist bent. (9) As Dawn went into the school without Buffy, she said
“to serve man is a cookbook”. To Serve Man was a Twilight
Zone episode based on the short story of the same title by Damon Knight. (10)
The song in the coffee house is “So High” by Strange Radio. (11) Hallie said
the song was “happy, shiny crap”. That’s a reference to the song “Shiny Happy
People” by R.E.M. (12) The reference to Mrs. Czolgosz in the conversation
between Anya and Hallie is an obscure joke on Jane Espenson growing out of her
reference to the McKinley assassination in Superstar.
Leon Czolgosz was McKinley’s assassin. (13) Anya made someone’s boyfriend
French, although she wished him to be a frog, because the English historically
called the French “frogs”.(14) Buffy
called the spirits “resentful dead guys”, a play on the Grateful Dead.(15) Principal Wood used the phrase
“curiouser and curiouser”, which is from Alice
in Wonderland. (16) It’s a truly awful pun when Warren says that he’s “more
than flesh”. (17) Adam called Spike “Number 17”, a reference back to the
Initiative (and to The Prisoner),
which called Spike “Hostile 17”. (18) Because the show had been evicted from
Torrance (see trivia notes on Graduation
Day), they found a new location for the high school in Northridge, CA.

When Willows says that she's killed people, who, other than Warren, has she actually killed? Characters in the show and posters at the avlcub site use the plural when referring to the amount of people that Willow has killed and yet I cannot think of who else she has actually killed. Could you please shed some light on this issue?

I really, really liked the other 2 kids that Dawn befriends in the basement. At the end of the episode, I was like "Dawnie and those kids are going to be the next generation of Buffy, Willow & Xander!"... and then (I believe) they never show up again.

This kind of seems like a missed opportunity - the kids were different enough from Willow and Xander's personalities that I think it would've made S7 much, much stronger and anchored Dawn as a more important character. Oh well.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to Hannigan and Head's scenes in this episode - she is hitting exactly the right note of fragility and regret that makes us start down the road of forgiving her for last season, and the compassion in his performance sells it even more. These scenes in England feel like a breath of fresh air, they make the show feel more grounded, and I wish Season 7 could've spent more time there.

They had real world problems with filming in England. Apparently it rained constantly while they were there and they barely were able to rush out and shoot the outdoor scenes in moments of nicer weather.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Myth, Metaphor & Morality

I've collected and substantially edited the original BtVS blog posts into an ebook, which is by now very significantly better than the original essays. It's available here. I continue to update the book regularly. You can get the updated version at any time by asking Amazon, though you'll lose any bookmarks or highlights if you do that.
There's also now a paperback version, available from the same link.
For links to the original posts, scroll down below.

About Me

I grew up reading all kinds of F&SF. Oddly enough, I guess, for someone with my tastes, I'd never heard of the new TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My 9 year old daughter told me about it and asked me to watch it with her.
I got hooked pretty quickly and soon moved, like most Buffy fans, to the internet for more discussion. I found a site called All Things Philosophical on Buffy, etc. and made that a home. The posts here ultimately derive from that experience, combined with re-watching the show many times. I hope everyone who reads here loves the series as much as I do.